Collecting, Assembling and Creating

The collection of treadmill photos above is from Mark Luthringer's amazing Ridgmont Typologies art project. There are fifteen "typologies" in the project. It's really worth a look.

Luthringer simply took digital camera snapshots of various subjects (the front grill of trucks, roofs of homes) as a way of building typologies, which he believes can illuminate the "excess, redundancy, and meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption". 

As interesting as that concept is, I'm also fascinated by what he has to say about assembly-the combination of images in this case, as a way of deriving emergent meaning (really, as a DJ of twenty years I had never quite thought of the act of collecting and assembly of music and records quite like that, but that's what it is, in a nutshell, an act of creation from assembling other bits together based on connections that you hope crystallize). Initially, Luthringer was insulted when critics pointed to those aspects of his work (he thought that the focus should be on the subject itself), but he eventually came around to appreciate the unique contribution that he could make:

resulting assembly of pictures was itself a distinct entity,that the initial idea was my principal contribution, and that the subsequent making of pictures was anact of searching and collecting rather than seeing or creating. And about this process of collecting,I thought: instead of not acknowledging it or being uncomfortable with it, why not embrace it? Whynot use groups of images, rather than individual ones, as the currency of my work? Why not see what results from sacrificing form for efficiency?

I know very little about cognitive psychology, but I'm really interested in the process by which we contruct meaning by imposing or discovering order in the things around us, and Luthringer's project is a remarkably simple and vivid way of bringing that to life.

(his typologies) mimic the mental images I suspect many of us form as way ordering the chaos of abundance that surrounds us. We can’t help but form in our heads lists, groups and categories based on product, brand, price point, style, market segment, country of origin, etc.

To see one of these groups turned into a printed grid of images, though, is to be confronted by it in a way never possible when it’s just in our heads. We are presented with order, and while it is often an absurd, seemingly pointless order, it is one that we recognize immediately.

Going off on a bit of a tangent, here's another interesting collection of a beautifully-crafted assembly of images that hints at a meaning, though that meaning seems teasingly beyond our (or at least my) grasp.

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